‘A’   //   Easter 3   //   4-6-08   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

 

Scripture     Luke 24:13-35

 

 

OK, show of hands. I’m taking a survey. Is there anyone here who lives in abject fear of committing heresy? That’s what I thought … just one person. See, I have no training or education to do this. I just know how to read, and I know how to look stuff up. I think most of you know my Mom is a retired librarian. Well, and the other thing I have is, I have our Reformed tradition. I believe that I can learn about God from Scripture. A pastor I had 20 years ago, when I first was reconnecting with my faith, put it this way: you’ll learn more from reading the Bible than you will learn from the Bible by not reading it.

 

So, I might not be teaching the “right” lesson today, the orthodox lesson, the perfectly-in-accord-with-Presbyterian-theology lesson. But I do want to walk you through my experience of reading and studying this Gospel passage, because I think (hope?) that I learned some things that might be worth sharing.

 

There were two points in the story that caught my attention and wouldn’t let me go: one at the beginning: “Jesus came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him;” and one right after the breaking of the bread: “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.”

 

In the first one, where Jesus just kind of showed up on the road with them, why didn’t they recognize him? And in the second one, why, as soon as they did recognize him, did he vanish?

 

Picture it: Cleopas – I’ll call him Cleo for short – and another disciple are walking back from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Sunday afternoon, that first Easter day. Luke doesn’t name the other disciple … and so it was probably a woman. There’s some evidence to suggest that the second disciple was Cleo’s wife, and that Cleo’s wife’s first name was Mary. So we’ll call her that.

 

Maybe Cleo and Mary came to Jerusalem in the excitement of Jesus’ triumphal Palm Sunday arrival. Maybe they heard him preach on Monday or Tuesday, or maybe they were there, cheering him on as he went after the moneylenders at the Temple. Then maybe, on Thursday, they had a nice Passover dinner with their families. And then on Friday, they woke up to find that disaster had struck. Overnight, their teacher was arrested, tried, and sentenced, and his execution is scheduled for that very afternoon. And he is strung up like a common criminal, and he’s dead, and he can’t even get a proper burial because at sundown, it’s Sabbath and no work can be done. The body is stashed in a hole in the rock, and it’s over. It’s all over. Come Sunday morning, the body is even gone. A few women say “two men in dazzling clothes” told them Jesus had “risen from the dead”, but nobody actually sees him.

 

Cleo and Mary have to get going – it’s two or three hours walk back to Emmaus – so after they grab a quick lunch, and buy a loaf of bread for supper, they set off with heavy hearts. And then this guy comes up to them on the road and asks, hey, why the long faces? This guy … it’s Jesus! But they don’t recognize him! What’s up with that? It’s not like he’s not on their minds! And besides, he gives them the best on-the-road Bible study session they’ve ever heard, and they still don’t catch on.

 

Fast forward to Cleo and Mary’s home in Emmaus. They’re good people, they invite the guy to stay for supper before he travels on. They put the loaf of bread on the table and they all sit. Cleo, as the host, is about to say grace when this guy picks up the bread and he says grace instead. Cleo and Mary are, like, “What the …?” And then the guy breaks the bread so they all can share it. And Cleo and Mary are, “It’s him! … Wait! Where’d he go? What the …?”

 

So why didn’t they recognize him before, back on the road, when he was preaching and teaching and calling them to believe, like they were used to seeing and hearing Jesus do?

 

And then when they finally, finally did recognize him, why did he vanish?

 

Now here’s where I’m going to start getting myself in trouble. The real theologians start proposing ideas that, yes, he was resurrected in body, but it was a different kind of body, a different form of body, and that’s why they didn’t recognize him. I saw one article in the Journal of Theological Studies, titled “Polymorphic Christology: Its origins and development in early Christianity,” published by, I don’t know, some outfit called Oxford University Press. But when I read this kind of stuff, from the “real theologians”, it didn’t help to connect me to the story. It externalized the whole question. It didn’t help me find a hook inside myself so that I could learn something from this passage.

 

So I decided to ignore the professionals and just ask, what if it were me? If I were Mrs. Cleopas – Mary – what would keep me from recognizing Christ when he was standing right in front of me? And then I had the Aha! As Jenny, what keeps me from recognizing Christ when he’s right there in front of me?

 

Now, when you all ask yourselves that question – what you have in common with Mary (or Cleo for the guys) – there could be as many different answers as there are people here: fear, pride, ignorance, stubbornness, even just inattentiveness, whatever. For me personally, though, what can “hold my eyes from recognizing Christ” is … well, if I want to be charitable I can call it lack of imagination. If I want to be tough on myself I can call it unbelief. Really, it’s probably somewhere in between those two.

 

Going back to Mary (and Cleo), she’s letting what she’s seen in the physical, material world limit her faith. She thought she knew how this was going to go, with the new King, the Messiah; she thought she knew what triumph would look like. And it sure didn’t look like a dead man. So her frame of reference was already circumscribed to not allow for a Jesus that could show up on the Emmaus road on Sunday afternoon.

 

Same thing for me. The times when I don’t recognize Christ are when my faith isn’t big enough to allow all things to be possible with God. All things.

 

Obviously, I can’t give you an example where Christ is before me right now and I don’t recognize him – if I could give you the example that would mean I recognize him, right? But I can identify times in the past where it was only later that I knew that it had been Christ I was seeing.

 

For some time over the past couple/few years, I’d been edging toward accepting that I wasn’t meant to administer computers for the rest of my days, that my future lay in working with people, and in particular working with people on a spiritual level. But that’s impossible, I told myself. I have this University job, this computer career, and, as long as that’s the case, there’s no way I can move into a whole new kind of vocation.

 

Then, a little over a year ago, my boss came to me and told me that senior management had decided to close my department, lay off all my staff, and lay off the 65% of me that was assigned to managing the department. I’ll freely admit that my first thought was not, oh, here I am on the road to Emmaus, and this is the risen Christ talking to me.

 

But it has turned out that this was indeed God appearing in my life, acting to bring it to the tipping point that it needed to reach. Yeah. As many of you know, I’ll be heading to seminary this fall, and to the ministry after that. All things are possible.

 

So, remember my other big question from the passage today: why, once Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas did recognize Jesus, why did he disappear? They just had this one moment of seeing, recognizing, knowing that he still lived after all, after all that had happened. Why not stay around, at least for a little while, at least for supper?

 

Why not? Well, I think because, at that point, he had accomplished what he’d intended to accomplish when he arrived in the first place: to teach his followers – to remind them yet again – that this new relationship with God goes beyond all limits, even his own death. That’s so powerful, so radical, it can be hard to keep in mind. Or keep in heart, to keep as the basis of your faith.

 

So Jesus – Christ – God – is willing to make himself known in some kind of tangible way to help strengthen his disciples’ faith. But after that, it’s up to them. Us. The purpose of that strength of faith is to give disciples the foundation they – we – need to carry on the rest of God’s work in the world.

 

Chuck alludes to this whenever he leads us in communion – when he says, “’Take, eat, this is my body,’ in other words, you are my body now.”

 

So our sense of God’s presence is transitory. God is with us, not to prove how alive he is after his death, but to remind us that it’s our relationship with God that enables us to do God’s work. That love, that acceptance, that forgiveness – that grace, we call it – is what inspires our compassion for helping others, it’s what gives us the strength to comfort and heal, it fuels our passion for justice; that loving relationship with God is the source of all the love that we carry out into the world.

 

And that’s what happens in our story. Cleo’s and Mary’s faith is fired up by this moment of recognizing God’s presence with them – they talk about their hearts burning – and even though it’s close to the end of the day and they’ve got seven miles ahead of them, they immediately leave their little house and go back to the city to join in the work of being disciples.

 

So there we have it: even when we’re feeling the limitations of our faith, because our imagination is not big enough to see and believe in God’s big picture, even then – or precisely then – that’s when God does something – some little thing like breaking bread – to make himself known to us, if only for a moment – to strengthen our faith, then leave us to live out that faith in our world.